Earlier this month Frederick Brown has been arrested and charged with 10 felonies after he was busted selling pirated games and modding consoles. His home was raided by the San Diego Computer And Technology Crime High-Tech Response Unit (C.A.T.C.H.), but he is now free after posting a $100,000 bail. In cases like these with huge sums of bail money, despite it being returned to the suspect at the end of the trial, I always wonder if the suspects are actually using illegally earned money to post that bail? Anyway…
In his home, Brown had over a thousand copies of pirated games as well as a large number of mod chips. Brown had allegedly built up a thriving business selling pirated games and installing mod chips, having advertised his services on Craigslist and other web sites. He allegedly sold pirated games from his Vista, CA, residence as well, including both discs and hard drives preloaded with games that he would illegally install into customers’ Xboxes and Xbox 360s, Entertainment Software Association senior VP for intellectual property enforcement Ric Hirsch told Ars Technica.
“Some of our member companies had seen his listings on Craigslist,” Hirsch said. “We started to make some inquiries on our own last year and eventually through our investigations accumulated enough evidence to bring it to the attention of the C.A.T.C.H. team.”
Hirsch explained that the ESA chose to pursue a criminal case instead of suing Brown in civil court because of the scope of his activities. “CATCH was very receptive to the evidence we brought them and were able to put the investigation together in very short order,” Hirsch said.
In the US, the DMCA bars the use of technological measures to bypass copy protection, and mod chips fall in to that category. Console manufacturers have taken an extremely dim view of mod chips, with Microsoft recently seeking out and kicking modded Xboxes off of Xbox Live. Last fall, a French company called Divineo that sold mod chips for the major consoles was hit with a $9 million judgment after being sued by Sony and the ESA.
Unlike this case, modding isn’t always done with evil pirating intention, though. Mod chips also allow gamers and game programmers to play out-of-region games and homebrew software that unmodded consoles cannot play.